Media & Technology: Equipment

Whether it’s a rec center, arena or field house, when you run an athletic program, it’s important that all of your equipment and important information be organized and easy to access. When properly managed, the athletic storage room can be one of the most useful, specialized storage areas in your facility. It can increase security, space, productivity and convenience.

Case Study

Beyond the playing surface itself, sports fans' eyes are drawn most often to one must-have venue amenity: the scoreboard. For high school administrators committed to modernizing their facilities without the funding to do so, scoreboards are increasingly seen as a great place to start. "Budgets are tighter than they've ever been," says Mike Daniel, CEO for Murray, Ky.-based Sportable Scoreboards. "Athletics has such a broad footprint, as it draws in so many folks to the school, that athletic administrators have to come across as putting their best foot forward, and a scoreboard is a big part of that."

By now it's likely you've seen NBC's story, "How Safe Is the Artificial Turf Your Child Plays On?" The 3,500-word story was first published on October 8th and has been the topic of a lot of conversation in the athletic and recreation industries. The video version of the story has aired on just about every NBC News program.

One of the hottest trade shows to attend this year if you were a leading fitness company isn't one typically associated with fitness: the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show), held this past January in Las Vegas. "I've been going to CES for many years, and this was the first year Precor had a booth," says David Flynt, director of Precor's Experience Development Center. "It was fascinating to see the growth of the digital health space, but more interesting was the way the concepts and issues around digital health were showing up in other booths. You couldn't go into a big booth — Intel, Sony, Samsung, any of these traditional CES companies — without finding some aspect of digital health."

Whether 2014 is indeed the "year of the wearable" as predicted at International CES remains to be seen, but there's no doubt that the ability to capture data about lifestyle and exercise habits is significantly impacting the way people work out — and there's still a great deal of potential to be realized. "When people engage with tech, they're beginning to expect that something is being captured about that experience," says David Flynt, director of Precor's Experience Development Center. "Today's wearables are really great at capture. What we want to be able to do is reflect back to them something that is able to give them control over that data. We're looking at how to help them understand what that data means."

Perfect for protecting your athletic facilities, the Guardian 8 Pro V2 is an enhanced non-lethal tool designed to deliver layered defense and incident recording to all security professionals. Join Nick Sundberg of the Washington Redskins as he learns how to use the device in this short video.